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Friday, May 05, 2006

A good introduction to malware

Current music: #Musik Club

What the heck is malware? Why is it an issue? What other silliness is going on out there? Bruce Schneier writes up a pretty good overview in Wired, Everyone Wants to 'Own' Your PC.

4 comments:

  1. I had read about malware before and went and got every free spyware/whatever I could find. I still don't know enough to know if it's working or not. It all says nothing found, but what does that mean to me?

    The only way I know for the majority of people to feel secure is not to hook up to the internet. However, once you've gotten on the net, it's a hard habit to break

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very true, FM, about not knowing for sure. The two best free tools are Spybot and AdAware, and they both catch things the other doesn't. Microsoft has a new entry that’s also free, and there’s one called ClamAV that’s also worth keeping around. Other operating systems are also less susceptible to parasitic (and viral) software, partly because they’re not a target and mostly because they’re designed better.

    I use MacOSX pretty much exclusively. I have a copy of ClamAV and even remember to run it every once in a while. Other than that, I don’t much worry about malware.

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  3. I've got both the Spybot and AdAware, plus AVG and CCleaner. My last computer crashed in Dec. and ever since I've been very paranoid about stuff like that.

    I don't think it was anything like that, that made mine crash. I left it on over night(which I never do) and the next morning it wouldn't recognize drive C. I've replaced the battery and I'm in the process of getting new cables, but again, I don't know.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The hard drive itself could have gone Tango Uniform on you. I’ve had a couple of drives do that, but fortunately I had the important stuff backed up elsewhere.

    ReplyDelete

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